Sunday, October 03, 2004

THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE REVIEWED

I loved this "abbreviated" version of the Presidential debate. Very funny.

One Hundred Percenter argues that Jim Lehrer showed a liberal bias in the questions he asked during the Presidential debate.

Hugh Hewitt has a very good analysis of the debate -- with particular emphasis on two big blunders that he thinks Kerry made, about banning bunker busters and seeking global approval before acting in America's defence.

There is a list here or here of 16 "inaccuracies" that John Kerry uttered during the debate.

SCSU Scholars compares John Kerry's policies to the wimpish policies of the ancient Trojans in The Iliad who were eventually destroyed by the tougher Greeks.

Peg Kaplan (a Jewish girl with an Irish first name! My mother was a "Peg" too -- short for Margaret) has a heartfelt post about why the holocaust convinces her that Bush is the right man for America.

A relevant remark from Saint Augustine of Hippo: "Though wisdom without eloquence is of little service to states, yet eloquence without wisdom is frequently a positive injury, and is of service never." ("On Christian Doctrine" - Book IV, Argument).

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AUSTRALIA

Cynical Leftist hypocrisy: "Some breathtaking promises have been made in this election campaign - Medicare Gold, the 30 per cent child-care tax rebate - but nothing tops Labor's $3.7 billion-a-year tax and family plan. It's unheard of for politicians to promise tax changes that would leave some people worse off, yet that's what Mark Latham has done. What's more, apart from some well-off single-income families, the losers are the poorest families in the nation. Not a good look from a Labor leader. But the tax changes are much more than that. On the one hand they're a huge politically motivated bribe, carefully targeted at the kind of families prevalent in marginal electorates."

Another Leftist bishop: "Australia is "hell-bent on a course of disturbingly questionable morality", the outgoing head of the Australian Anglican Church said yesterday. In what many will see as an intervention in the last week of the election campaign, church head Peter Carnley made a scathing attack on the "so-called war against terrorism" and the Government's treatment of asylum seekers".

Australia's elitist Left: "Labor's electoral base is divided between a relatively small number of new-class social professionals and a relatively large number of people in traditional working-class occupations. These two groups often hold different values on political questions, such as border control, the size of the immigration program, cultural pluralism and so on. Labor candidates in federal elections are more likely to sympathise with the social professionals' values than with those of their traditional supporters".

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ELSEWHERE

Saddam and Bin Laden WERE linked: "Anyone who has actually read the report would know that the 9/11 Commission had plenty to say about the connections between al Qaeda and Iraq, but because much of its findings were beyond the scope of its charter, important details went unstated in public hearings or were buried in the minutiae of the published narrative. Virtually every reporter I have spoken to has failed to answer this basic question satisfactorily: "Have you actually read the report?" The answer is almost always a sheepish "No." Those who have only given it a cursory scan may have missed the fine-print chapter notes where explosive information about names, dates, places, and conversations concerning the Iraq-al Qaeda connection are outlined in chilling detail."

V.D. Hanson on whether support for Israel is to blame for the huge Islamic hostility towards the West: "Kuwait ethnically cleansed thousands of Palestinians and now blames us for our supposed callousness toward the West Bank. China swallowed Tibet and the world snores. By 1967 the Arab world had simply deported almost all its Jews and sent them to Israel -and few complained. The Sudanese government has killed more black Africans in a week than Israel has Palestinians in a decade, and the Arab World is silent. The first three wars between 1947-1967 were not over the West Bank. And when it is autonomous, the next one won't be either. And on and on and on"

Belmont Club has some encouraging comments about the recent recapture of an Iraqi city (Samarra) from rebels by combined U.S. and Iraqi forces. See also here for the latest.

Terrorist U.N.: "The Israel Defense Forces released video footage Friday taken by an unmanned aircraft showing what appeared to be Palestinians in the Gaza Strip loading rockets into a vehicle marked "U.N." The black-and-white footage, taken by a drone - or unmanned aircraft - flying over the Gaza Strip, showed the militants driving off in the white van, with "U.N." marked in black on its roof. The IDF is furious at the United Nations representatives in the Gaza Strip, "who continuously stress that they are an international organization and of course is not in any way involved in terrorism,""

Icelandic blogger "Willy Sutton" has a new libertarian site. He has a lot of John Stossel stuff up that everybody ought to know but which almost nobody does.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause


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